Facts, Not Myths, About the Loch Ness Monster

Image purportedly of the Loch Ness Monster swimming in Loch Ness on a sunny day.

Ad Meskens / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0

There are plenty of exaggerations, myths, and outright lies circulating about the so-called Loch Ness Monster. This legend is especially galling to paleontologists, who are constantly being told by people who should know better (and by overeager reality-TV producers) that Nessie is a long-extinct dinosaur or marine reptile.

01
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The World's Most Famous Cryptid

Artist rendering of Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, walking through the forest on a bright day.

John M Lund Photography Inc / Getty Images

Sure, Sasquatch, the Chupacabra, and Mokele-mbembe all have their devotees. But the Loch Ness Monster is far and away the most famous "cryptid" — that is, a creature whose existence has been attested to by various "eyewitnesses" and which is widely believed in by the general public, but is still not recognized by establishment science. The pesky thing about cryptids is that it's logically impossible to prove a negative, so no matter how much huffing and puffing the experts do, they can't state with 100 percent certainty that the Loch Ness Monster doesn't exist.

02
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The First Reported Sighting Was During the Dark Ages

Statue of Nessie as seen from below against a backdrop of trees and blue sky.

Miquel Rosselló Calafell / Pexels

Way back in the 7th century CE, a Scottish monk wrote a book about St. Columba, who (a century before) had supposedly stumbled upon the burial of a man who had been attacked and killed by a "water beast" in the vicinity of Loch Ness. The trouble here is, even the learned monks of the early Dark Ages believed in monsters and demons, and it's not uncommon for the lives of the saints to be sprinkled with supernatural encounters.

03
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Popular Interest Exploded in the 1930s

Statue of the Loch Ness Monster floating in a lake.

GregMontani / Pixabay

Let's fast-forward 13 centuries, to the year 1933. That's when a man named George Spicer claimed to have seen a huge, long-necked, "most extraordinary form of animal" slowly crossing the road in front of his car, on its way back into Loch Ness. It's unknown if Spicer and his wife had partaken of a wee bit o' the creature that day (European slang for drinking alcohol), but his account was echoed a month later by a motorcyclist named Arthur Grant, who claimed that he narrowly avoided striking the beastie while out on a midnight drive.

04
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The Famous Photo Was an Out-And-Out Hoax

Famous black-and-white Loch Ness Monster photo.

Matt84 / Getty Images

A year after the eyewitness testimony of Spicer and Grant, a doctor named Robert Kenneth Wilson took the most famous "photograph" of the Loch Ness Monster: a dappled, undulating, black-and-white image showing the long neck and small head of a placid-looking sea monster. Though this photo is often used as incontrovertible evidence of Nessie's existence, it was proven to be a fake in 1975, and then again in 1993. The giveaway is the size of the lake's surface ripples, which don't match the presumed scale of Nessie's anatomy.

05
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The Loch Ness Monster Is Not a Dinosaur

Artist rendering of two Brachiosaurus dinosaurs at a lake.

Elenarts / Getty Images

After Robert Kenneth Wilson's famous photograph was published, the resemblance of Nessie's head and neck to that of a sauropod dinosaur did not go unnoticed. The problem with this identification is that sauropods were terrestrial, air-breathing dinosaurs. While swimming, Nessie would have to poke her head out of the water once every few seconds. The Nessie-as-sauropod myth may have drawn on the 19th-century theory that Brachiosaurus spent most of its time in the water, which would help to support its massive weight.

06
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It's Also Unlikely That Nessie Is a Marine Reptile

An early depiction of Elasmosaurus, paper and pencil sketch.

Charles R. Knight / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Okay, so the Loch Ness Monster isn't a dinosaur. Could it possibly be a type of marine reptile known as a plesiosaur? This isn't very likely, either. For one thing, Loch Ness is only about 10,000 years old, and plesiosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. For another thing, marine reptiles weren't equipped with gills, so even if Nessie were a plesiosaur, she'd still have to surface for air numerous times every hour. Lastly, there simply isn't enough food in Loch Ness to support the metabolic demands of a ten-ton descendant of elasmosaurus!

07
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Nessie Simply Doesn't Exist

Loch Ness on sunny day with calm waters, no monsters or craft visible.

Ivan / Getty Images

You can see where we're going with this. The primary "evidence" we have for the Loch Ness Monster's existence consists of a pre-medieval manuscript, the eyewitness testimony of two Scottish motorists who may well have been drunk at the time (or lying to divert attention from their own reckless behavior), and a forged photograph. All of the other reported sightings are completely unreliable. Despite the best efforts of modern science, absolutely no physical trace of the Loch Ness Monster has ever been found.

08
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People Make Money Off the Loch Ness Myth

A Loch Ness tour boat docked at the lake on a bright, sunny day.

hillofthirst / Pixabay

Why does the Nessie myth persist? At this point, the Loch Ness Monster is so intimately tied up with the Scottish tourist industry that it's in no one's best interest to pry into the facts too closely. The hotels, motels, and souvenir stores in the vicinity of Loch Ness would go out of business, and well-meaning enthusiasts would have to find another way to spend their time and money, rather than walking around the rim of the lake with high-powered binoculars and gesticulating at suspicious ripples.

09
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TV Producers Love the Loch Ness Monster

Stylized artist rendering of the Loch Ness Monster looking fierce.

fergregory / Getty Images

You can bet that if the Nessie myth were on the brink of extinction, some enterprising TV producer, somewhere, would find a way to whip it up again. Animal Planet, National Geographic, and The Discovery Channel all derive a good slice of their ratings from "what if?" documentaries about cryptids like the Loch Ness Monster, though some are more responsible with the facts than others (remember Megalodon?). As a general rule, you shouldn't trust any TV show that touts the Loch Ness Monster as reality. Remember that TV is all about money, not science.

10
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People Will Continue to Believe

Artist drawing of the Loch Ness Monster as seen above and below the surface of the water.

Sergey Krasovskiy / Stocktrek Images / Getty Images

Why, despite all the indisputable facts detailed above, do so many people around the world continue to believe in the Loch Ness Monster? It is scientifically impossible to prove a negative. There will always be the slightest outside chance that Nessie really exists and the skeptics will be proved wrong. But it seems to be intrinsic to human nature to believe in supernatural entities, a vast category that encompasses gods, angels, demons, the Easter Bunny, and, yes, our dear friend Nessie.

Source

Tattersall, Ian and Peter Névraumont. Hoax: A History of Deception: 5,000 Years of Fakes, Forgeries, and Fallacies. Black Dog & Leventhal, March 20, 2018.

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Strauss, Bob. "Facts, Not Myths, About the Loch Ness Monster." ThoughtCo, Apr. 5, 2023, thoughtco.com/facts-about-the-loch-ness-monster-1092021. Strauss, Bob. (2023, April 5). Facts, Not Myths, About the Loch Ness Monster. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/facts-about-the-loch-ness-monster-1092021 Strauss, Bob. "Facts, Not Myths, About the Loch Ness Monster." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/facts-about-the-loch-ness-monster-1092021 (accessed March 28, 2024).